Facebook, Twitter, and the Tsarnaevs

When we log on to Facebook, it asks, “What’s on your mind?” It asks that of those planning to plant bombs and those planning breakfast. And Facebook has continued to ask us to share more—more thoughts, more often, with more people—along with nearly every other piece of technology or service worth mentioning. It’s by this process that Zuckerberg’s law, that we share twice as much every year as we did the year before, is less a corporate goal or metric than a sweeping cultural force.

What Facebook and Twitter purport to offer us to explain the Tsarnaev brothers, accused of the Boston Marathon bombings, and all humans, is seductive: they claim to reveal our true selves. We can even sign in to a multitude of other sites and services using our Facebook and Twitter accounts; they are us, for many practical intents and purposes. But, more dramatically, as we accede to their imperatives to share more of ourselves—what we’re doing, what we’re feeling, who we’re feeling, where we’ve been—they manage to take that increasingly vast, chaotic array of data that tumbles directly out of our heads and mold it into a single, simple digestible stream. The entropy of our lives is conquered by a clean timeline. It should all make sense. So what happens after a crime or a disaster when we look back and it doesn’t?

This week in the magazine, David Remnick describes the Twitter stream of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother, as “a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection.” It’s true: as social networks capture more of our lives, the information they collect is increasingly the banal; the choice between scrambled or sunny-side-up eggs, and complaints about pop-up ads. It does not get much more everyday life than quietly celebrating the small victories, like waking up before the alarm clock goes off or quoting Dr. Dre lyrics. Some people were taken aback that Dzhokhar tweeted several times after the bombing had taken place—but when tweeting is as mundane as breathing, how could he not? (Besides, to stop tweeting—that would be suspicious. That would be weird.)

Who is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? We ask this question of every person accused of a horrific crime. We try to reckon with the monstrous, to discover when the humanity died, or if it existed in the first place—maybe in part to assure ourselves that we are not monsters, too.

We turn to religion, to culture, to history. We’ll rely on the answers that Dzhokhar gives while being interrogated, knowing that those answers will come from a nineteen-year-old boy who is imprisoned and faces death or the rest of his life in a Supermax cell—not the boy who decided to place the bombs or the “cool guy” who was just “really into marijuana,” as a friend, Ashraful Rahman, described him. And we will also turn to social media.

Like most people under thirty with Internet access, Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan (twenty-six), have left behind extensive online lives that are laid bare for anyone to look at. Dzhokhar had a Facebook account, a VK account (essentially, the Russian Facebook), and a Twitter account with over a thousand tweets, going to back to October, 2011, nearly a year before he came a naturalized U.S. citizen. Tamerlan had aYouTube account with playlists called “Islam” and “Terrorists.”

There are narratives that emerge from the digital soup: Seven months ago, Tamerlan, who increasingly appears to be the radical catalyst of the brothers, created a YouTube playlist containing “Trance & Dance Mix,” a driving, pulsing eighty-one-minute track, and “Vocal Trance Pure Essence V.13 Mixed Dj Ash~.” (The other item in the playlist is a song whose title is coarsely translated by Google as “Jihad Devote His Life,” by Timur Mutsurayev, a folksy-sounding religious Chechen singer and the playlist’s namesake.) A month later, Tamerlan created the “Islam” playlist, which contains seven religious videos. A month after that—five months ago—he created “Terrorists.” It seems like a simple, linear progression: dance videos, Islam, terrorism.

But these digital lives are divorced from their original circumstances, reconstituted in a world brimming with new context. Dzhokhar’s tweet that “you will have to make tough decisions today and those decisions will influence your future, hardships will arouse and yu will roll up loud” now rings with an ominous tone—but at the time, he followed it up, a minute later, with, “I just wrote y’all a horoscope for the day and most of you will be like ‘dam, that shit was so accurate.’”

For all of the unbridled interiority that social networks suggest they convey, social media does not turn people inside out; it is a single side of a person, the face they put on for the rest of the world. It is worth looking at that face for the same reason we look somebody in the eye, hoping that some bit of what’s really inside slips through. We may know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev slept, but we have no idea whether he dreamt peacefully or tossed and turned fitfully. If only he had a FitBit.

Photograph by Ruslan Krivobok/RIA Novosti/Camera Press/Redux.

Matt Buchanan was a science and technology editor for newyorker.com from 2013 to 2014.